Adaptive Stress deserves exploration and Three is my Magic Number.

Adaptive stress can make or break us. Today, we’ll look at 3 low cost strategies to better deal with adaptive stress. I believe these 3 strategies help me look younger than I am. I aim to do them at least a few times a week .

Recently, I was visited by a physiotherapist who specialises in walking. I believe she gives talks about fall prevention to hospitals and social centres for the elderly.

How lucky am I?

Her workplace is about two streets from where I live. I aim to be walking to her for our next visit.

Almost the best bit about the appointment was being told I don’t look old enough for my age (She works with elders quite regularly so perhaps this is a regular intro for her to help her clients feel at ease?)

I choose not to think so!

But it got me wondering about a handful of the things I do regularly that might be keeping me looking younger than I am?

Three is the magic number for studying my youth prolonging dealings with adaptive stress

  • A minute’s blast of cold shower at the end of a regular, hot shower.
  • Restricting eating to between an 8 and 10 hour window every day.
  • Drink tea made from grated ginger, regularly.

An Exploration of thriving with Adaptive Stress.

Hormesis can be used to explain the body’s benefit from cold showers, skipping a meal now and then and taking freshly grated, ginger tea. It basically works from Neitzsche’s principal that ‘whatever doesn’t kill us makes us/our cells stronger!

Our physiology could be said to panic a little/adaptive stress but then finds out that cold water won’t cause death and so can be safely experimented with. Actually, the shock seems to wake me up quite well. The bracingness creates a huge boost of mitochondria. This adaptive stress (the powerhouses of our cells is responsible for an efficient conversion of energy/gives us our ‘get up and go’.

  • Our cells panic for a while in the cold and become flooded with cortisol to help us avoid an undefined ill. This redirects blood away from digestion and to our limbs for running away to better escape the undefined ill.
  • Restricting our eating to a smaller window of the day is another adaptive stress and gives our body a chance to focus on other essential processes. Everything we eat needs to be ‘read’ and assessed by our body. In this process it passes through the liver which takes time and energy. The liver, brain, heart and kidneys are the biggest users of energy if we live a relatively sedentary life.

Our body decides (mostly thankfully) that it makes sense to keep our legs working ahead of our tummies digesting. Mostly, this is a good thing but not always please see an earlier post here. In times of action our bodies become less equipped to process lunch. There is some truth to ‘don’t swim straight after eating’ but it’s something we can experiment safely with on OUR own body.

To avoid the pitfalls of too much adaptive stress, there are a range of answers about what the optimal time for intermittent fasting is.

Women’s needs are different to men’s (we have different hormones and  fat deposition). Our processing of fat/energy is less forgiving than men’s who have a higher level of testosterone and, if chosen, are better suited to use energy and remain lean. Also, men aren’t built to potentially house developing babies. Women apparently won’t benefit fasting intermittently for longer than around 14 hours between meals without raising our cortisol levels high enough to promote  inflammation?

  • Grated ginger tea is another technique for keeping the body on its toes. I feel  this creates another, acceptable form of adaptive stress (hormesis).

Some types of stress are worth seeking out and can do us good. I wonder whether these tips/tricks/life hacks perhaps contribute to my body appearing younger than it is?

The image I’ve chosen to illustrate this post is of my neighbour. As he grows he gets more interested in the world around him. Just one way he is becoming better suited to cope well with adaptive stress.

Stressors

Today’s post is suitable for those with MS and those who live in the world, generally. Stress is everywhere and it’s worse for us all than we might at first think.

Apologies Shakespeare for paraphasing the start of Sonnet 43:

Sress, how do we love thee? let me count the number of ways (in no particular order)

  • Sugar causes our body to make changes (normalise elevated blood sugar) to get back to a level  playing field (homeostasis). This requirement of extra chemical processes is a stress on our body. Although as the last chocolate brownie post said, if we consciously choose sugar enjoy the experience that can come from it (breaking sweet bread together).
  • sugar, is just one of the addictive substance which all present a psychological aswell as physiological stress for us: We’re no longer choosing that last cookie/insert preferred naughty but nice poison here. Instead we’re in the grasp of something we have no control over.
  • Lack of control in all sorts of arenas can cause our bodies stress.
  • Lack of sleep: I started this post in my head whilst lying awake unable to find sleep. I’d done all the ‘concentrate on your breathing’ and ‘watch intrusive thoughts drift past on a waterway of calm’ but the waterway of calm was more of a babbling brook and had the potential  to reach rushing, Niagran proportions.
  • In this age of 24hr rolling news, with its wails of heightened terror alerts and tales of impending doom every day our body and brain can be forgiven for being in a state of constant arousal. This is fine for short bursts, it allows us to do the living of life.

stressors come in all shapes and sizes.

Our brains can get stuck in the fight, flight or freeze mode (deadline brought forward or an altercation with someone from work are our modern equivalents of a sabre tooth tiger).

Unfortunately, this gives us a permanently elevated cortisol level.

When these stressors come into our life the sympathetic nervous system throws out cortisol as if our lives depended on it. The body can’t spend any time in ‘rest and digest’ mode. Food doesn’t get digested effectively and nutrients aren’t absorbed. Our body is ready for the ‘off’.

These somewhat avoidable states of stress also use up our store of various B vitamins which can further impact on our body’s ability to cope with stress…

Essential maintenance gets pushed to the bottom of the body’s priority list, including essential, unpanicked functioning of our immune system. If we’re stuck in this mode for extended periods of time the immune system can start going a bit postal. Some argue our increased stress levels are contributing to the increase in auto-immune related disorders.

 

When the parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, our body can start spending time and energy repairing and protecting itself.

Both these nervous systems are part of the autonomic nervous system. (We’re a complicated little kit of no instructions, aren’t we?) Mostly, the ANS is in charge of stuff so we don’t have to consciously think about it: like when to start panicking, breathing, sweating and when to get roused into anger or lust.

Stuff we don’t need to have much control over.

But some of it… we can shape.

The jolt of coffee feeling that cortisol produces (a release of adrenaline accompanies caffeine and contributes to many of the cells in the body getting focused. They are undistracted and better able to prime themselves for flight); This feeling can become quite addictive. I’m curious myself whether this might explain some of the interactions in our lives that seemed to erupt from nowhere?

Are some of us addicted to that caffeine free, self produced little buzz of hyper-alertness?

How can we get our bodies under the parasympatheic nervous system’s shielding wing?

Look out for the next installment which explores some of the strategies to get to that calm, healing space most of us visit briefly most days.

Project MS

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not really Project MS, it’s ‘project me’.

Project managing the most important project of our lives can get pretty stressful if we allow it to. When you think about it, we all project manage our own health (to a greater or lesser extent) every day of our lives.

If we go out to a party we might try and arrange not to have anything too taxing to do the day afterwards. If we help friends celebrate a little too enthusiastically with either cake or booze or a very late night we might take a few more walks, early nights and fewer parties for the next few weeks.

I’m choosing to be aware of my own behaviours in order to get the best care for myself.

We need to be our own project managers and call on the trades that have historically done us well: physiotherapists, nutritionists and a variety of bodywork technicians.

tool kit on the wall

The impact of disordered blood flow in the MS patient, it has been argued, contributes to the lesions or scars in brain tissue and perhaps an overall shrinking of brain volume over time (although reduced activity can also be at fault here?) Deterioration in mobility for people with multiple sclerosis is, in part affected by having less real estate in the brain for messages to get through to where they need to go.

The head needs a steady flow of blood to transport oxygen and glucose to the brain. In MS patients with slower blood flow it has been hypothesised, brain cells can die sooner than for everyone else. Exercise, with its increase in heart rate and breathing might slow down what is apparently inevitable atrophy in the MS’d brain.

The congenital vascular abnormality theory is not widely held by many doctors. It feels like, from this patient’s perspective, medical professionals seem willing to state there are many potential causes for MS but neurologists seem unwilling to accept that the plumbing (fluids flowing in and out of the brain) cannot be one of those mysterious, as yet unidentified causes.

In the case of MS it seems treating the body (for the patient who owns the body) allopathically – dealing with symptoms rather than getting to the root of the condition (what the experts should be up to?) seems to be our best bet for feeling a little better.

Over the past 20 years I’m not sure I can include neurologists in the list of effective tradespeople for the body?

I think I’ll stick to the alternative, functional practitioners. People working in things that affect me every day:

  • Nutritionist, functional doctor,
  • Physiotherapist, Osteopath, Feldenkrais method practitioner,
  • Shiatsu, Acupuncture and Cranio Sacral Therapist.

So far, I’ve found these professionals to be of most use in keeping my body working as best it can… not forgetting doing an awful lot of reading of my own.

At the moment I’m quite taken with You Are The Placebo it brings a refreshing way of looking at the body we inhabit. It was preceded by Biology of Belief which got me thinking differently about a lot of things. Whist working fairly hard on getting my body to do its best I’ve realised it’s time my mind had some attention, too.

 

Circulation Cracked?


what does this image have to do with improved bloodflow?

Nothing, except mackerel is also good for the brain.

So, what if any benefits have I noticed after beginning to address circulation and bloodflow issues in me in 2012? Has improved bloodflow below my head made any sort of difference at all?

I believe it has and will list the three things I’m sure have improved and touch on a couple of other points at the end.

zebrafish

HEAT INTOLERANCE GONE

My brain no longer feels like an overheated computer that’s given up and switched itself off thanks to a prolonged lack of clear flow of air to its cooling fan. The same thing I (and others who believe in Chronic Cerebro Spinal Venous Insufficiency) was happening to my head. Blood was returning to the heart along the equivalent of tiny, country lanes (collaterals) instead of getting onto the motorway and speeding its way back to the heart. This leaves the head, so the theory goes with deoxygenated blood for longer than it should.

BRAIN FOG GONE… MOSTLY.

I still occasionally get a brain freeze like the Green Party Leader when being interviewed in the run up to the UK general election in February, 2015. When that happens, I completely forget what I’m talking and thinking about. She thankfully managed to continue getting words out! Nowadays this mostly happens when I’m stressed (as she was). A meal with more sugars than normal can disrupt the bacterial balance in my gut which I think also gives me a foggy/groggy brain after waking.

FATIGUE GONE.

Aswell as bone crushing tiredness (with no obvious culprit) I was also dozing off after meals which I think was more of an unsteady insulin response but since removing sugar and foods that turn to glucose quickly in the bloodstream this also has gone.

Exercise helped there, too. Specifically, short bursts of intense exercise got my body back to dealing better with sudden rushes of glucose. Raising my heart rate and breathing perhaps jolted my body out of its increasingly sedentary state and reminded it of how it used to function? I mention this as a disordered response to blood sugar also causes fatigue – we’re multifactorial beings so addressing bloodflow from the head was only ever going to be one part of my healing process.

In fact, it’s almost as if the way we treat our bodies has an effect on how they perform for us!

Who knew?

Two more angles to come at the MS symptom problem from are listed below:

I knew my love of zebras was more than just admiring their stripes! This piece of research tells of the zebrafish’s suitability for studying the formation of myelin, (transparent if brief lives). I think it’s safe to say MSers have never been transparent but more importantly in the area being researched in the zebrafish study we can no longer effectively make myelin.

This research makes me wonder why on earth the regrowing of myelin or the vascular aspect of MS not been major topics of investigation?

Sleep and getting useful amounts of it has been touted again in the wellbeing media as one of the kindest things we can do for our brains which is good news to me as I love the stuff!

making life a little bit better

A scarecrow frightening birds from a snowladen field in midwinter nicely sums up just how ‘surplus to requirements’ my poorly performing body can sometimes help me feel. At the same time the image reminds me the world keeps turning and what seems fixed and permanent now will eventually pass.

I figure this online presence allows me to share the stuff I’ve found makes my life a little better (see some of them here) in the hope that you will also share some of the approaches you are taking that have been making your life a little better. We could all try some of these things and by doing this we could make all our lives a little bit better.

I’m not making any huge claims. This is intentional. I, like everyone on earth have good days and bad days so I don’t want to set myself up for a fall (or fail for that matter) which would leave me with useless negative thought patterns shuffling through my head. I believe making life a little bit better can be well within all our grasps.

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks as my eyes have been playing up; making staring at screens awkward at best and the comprehension of words delightfully imprecise. I seem to have a jazz interpretation of predictive text going on between my eyes and brain.

I’ve been trying to work out whether this change in my vision is the fallout from a sugary christmas bringing on a New Year bloom of the opportunistic pathogen, candida albicans or simply recovery from a 24hr viral tummy bug that involved being sick a lot just before christmas.

small improvements

I now wonder what the point is in wasting valuable brain processing power on a query whose answer won’t bring a different outcome. The question of whether a viral fallout or a refreshed candida overgrowth has given me a blurry eye is unlikely to bring any improvements (I’m already back to being on the sugarless wagon).

  • Instead I’ve been going to bed early and sleeping deeply behind our blackout curtains. Our brains fix themselves best when we give them plenty of sleep.
  • I’ve been keeping up doing superslow hand weight exercises to try and stave off sarcopenia (muscle wasting through age isn’t inevitable but through inactivity it pretty much is).
  • The other thing I’ve been doing that helps me feel a little bit better is lying down for 20 minutes minimum with knees bent, feet flat on the ground and a book under my head. The vertebra in my spine seem to like having the chance to soread out (especially as I sleep on a slope (mentoned in the link list on the first line of the second paragraph of this post)

On the radio this morning was an interview with Dr Kate Granger who, after feeling dehumanised and no more than a bed number whilst in hospital started a twitter campaign to get consultants (the folk who mostly are no longer in white coats) to introduce themselves to patients under their care when on their rounds.

It’s the small things that can make life a little bit better. See a report into the benefits of compassion led patient care here.

I’ve touched on a number of things in this post which I’ll be returning to more fully in future. I guess I can sum up the content by saying getting lots of sleep and lying down have been helping me feel a little bit better recently.

 

Candida Schmandida?

There’s regularly much mention in complementary/well being/alternative circles about troubles with candida albicans, its overgrowth and the many and varied symptoms it can create in humans. This post will be looking at just one strand of how to get a body working better by introducing how to see if it’s a problem for you.

My next post will go into greater detail about how to reduce it’s presence in the body. Have a look online there are many people who suspect it could be an issue for a great many people – not just those with MS or other auto-immune conditions.

  • Have you had what feels like fatigue out of all proportion to any exertion on your part?
  • Do you get aching joints not explained away by your activities?

These are just a couple of the symptoms attached to the actions of this opportunistic organism in your system. Fatigue and aching joints could be down to many other things so read on to find out how to rule this culprit out.

other beings

When I first started my ‘journey’ towards enhancing my wellbeing (soon after diagnosis) I spent the afternoon in a bookshop choosing which book to buy to tell me something about the condition, Multiple Sclerosis, a self help guide seemed to be the most positive in outlook and full of what appeared useful stuff.

This all happened in the days before I was introduced to the internet but it’s still a great book and the guidelines hold their own against many websites and blogs nowadays. I’m eternally grateful to the author Judy Graham for introducing me to an alternative way of looking at my condition before the tsunami of auto-immune journeys flooded the wellness side of the web.

I’ve hesitated to use the word empowering in previous posts but I think it’s an apt description of the book I read and how I felt after reading it.

Since then all the Ws have arrived and google helped the web become a place to go and find stuff out, whilst not even having to put your shoes on to leave the house… what progress!

Various candida cleanses are available so I thought I’d join in! Seems to me the best place to start is finding out if it might be an issue for you and could be contributing to existing symptoms you may have.

My thanks to Christa Orecchio for some of the detail collected from a talk given to Sean Croxton (I mention his JERFing mantra elsewhere on here). Just eat real food (his mantra) I mention in an earlier post and backed up by Dr Josh Axe and any number of naturopathic practitioners:

  • first off is candida albicans rampaging in your body?

After getting up in the morning, before you brush your teeth or have a cup of tea/coffee/hot water and lemon juice (helps alkalize your system, I’ll write about this in another post) pour a glass of water and work up some spit in your mouth then spit into the glass and leave it til after you’ve had some breakfast (not somewhere where someone might accidentally drink it!)

  • After half an hour or so has your spit stayed floating on the surface of the water or has it ‘grown legs’ and some or all of it has sunk to the bottom of the glass?

When everything’s in order and we haven’t been taking another curse* (sic) of antibiotics or been dealing with a range of different stressors on the body (including physiological stress from food intolerances as well as  emotional and/or mental stress) we manage to co-exist with an array of symbiotic hitchikers in our systems. These guys live in our gut and help to digest our food when all’s going well and communicate with other parts of us like our brains and fat storing departments.

*Don’t get me wrong, antibiotics have their place but it seems we, as a society have come to rely on them too much which has brought its own well reported troubles.

You may have noticed, as members of the western ‘developed’ world, most of us are pretty good at not allowing our bodies to reach calm. Buddhists consider our constantly gabbling brain to be a ‘monkey mind‘. this incessant internal noise can contribute to a poorly performing immune system which, in turn can pave the way for an opportunist bacteria to make a break for the big time in your belly.

Anway, I should stop showing you evidence of my monkey mind and get back to the detail of this particular candida cleanse.

  • Did your spit sink?

If it did that’s a sign there are too many things living in your digestive tract (the tube between mouth and anus). In earlier posts I’ve mentioned Hippocrates and him believing that all disease starts in the gut. Most, if not all functional doctors agree.

One of the first things to do is remove from your diet stuff that these rowdy inhabitants of our gut like to eat. Unfortunately it’s the same kind of thing we can be partial to, too:

  • sugar
  • vinegar
  • yeast
  • alcohol

Incidentally, this is how sugar effects our brain without any need for ‘outside’ help. Sugar it seems doesn’t do us or critters living in us much good.

There’s more to follow but try doing less of these things to start with and see if your body behaves a little better without their influence.

My next post will go into more about the symptoms and the 2+ month protocol involved in slowly removing this energy robber from your system.

I mention Judy Graham as she talked about candida and I read about it some 15 years ago and things might have progressed differently if I’d tackled this situation then.

I appreciate if, if, if don’t amount to a hill o’ beans suffice to say I’m two months in to the no booze or sugar protocol and I think it’s doing me some good but perhaps too early to tell?

 

 

Learning for life

3434forblogdogs

Until we have a need to access professionals who can ‘fix’ us, healthcare’s all a bit fuzzy and indistinct in our minds. We’re built to not spend time on things that aren’t immediately concerning to our continued existence. We imagine if at all, everything will be working in our favour. Caregivers at all levels from consultants to care assistants are there primarily for our benefit. This article from the American Academy of Neurology explains why that may not always be the case.

It’s heartening to see this acknowledgement from a trusted player in the field. Some of the ground troops of various chronic conditions have had questions along these lines for a good few years.

One of our foundations in life is no longer the reliable anchor we once assumed it was. We have spent perhaps decades taking our health for granted. We are now calling on the skills of others to help us however they see fit.

We can choose to take a passive role in our functioning day-to-day but we are now given the opportunity to think differently by learning lots of new stuff. A lot of stuff we assumed was safe as houses we have now learnt, isn’t. Post 2008, is not the time or place to question that particular truism.

Here is one TED talk that highlights the vested interests involved in developed nations’ unquestionable truths about human nutrition.

Reading for ourselves is different now we’re not at school (honestly). For a start, we don’t have to do any of it if we don’t want to. We don’t have to hand our books in to be marked. No one is asking us to do it, we are doing it for the benefit of ourselves.

Doing this sort of activity luckily, is very good for our brains. In this 11 minute talk, Sandra Chapman PhD highlights how our brains relish and thrive on feeling challenged. When given something to get its teeth into our brain will do its best to rise to that challenge and become smarter and more effective which ultimately ends up benefitting us (Sudoku it seems isn’t the answer).

Here is another TED talk giving a refreshing, scientifically backed up way to look at how to change behaviour. It’s not suggested we rely on willpower rather, research has been undertaken to look into methods which allow us to be more aware of ourselves. In it Zoe Chance, a tutor at Yale University in the US lists the 5 qualities an activity needs to possess to have a chance at becoming habit forming. We are all works in progress so if we want to change something about ourselves, we can.

TED talks are great for taking (usually) less than half an hour of our life to tell us stuff we didn’t know and may well help make life a little better. I have a link to this particular TED talk somewhere else on this site. It’s such an important and relatively easily addressed area of our lives. Getting better sleep to reap a better experience of life is within most of our grasps. It all depends on how much we want it.